


The Path to Paradise

by byjillianmaria



Series: Back Into Time [1]
Category: Hadestown - Mitchell
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-25
Updated: 2019-06-25
Packaged: 2020-05-19 13:07:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19357642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/byjillianmaria/pseuds/byjillianmaria
Summary: Eurydice remembers.





	The Path to Paradise

_“It’s you.”_

Shock and despair and more than a little bit of guilt roughen his voice. The light behind him turns him into a silhouette, hiding his expression from her, but she doesn’t need to see it. As always, the poet’s voice does most of the work for him.

“It’s me.” Her voice cracks, and it is only then that she processes the depth of her own pain. They failed, they failed, they _failed_. It hadn’t even occurred to her that they would, for once in her life she’d had hope, she’d been so _sure_...

The light beyond mocks her, taunts her with a freedom she’ll never have.

“Orpheus?” She calls to him, and he calls her name back, but it doesn’t matter, it’s too late.

Eurydice falls.

She closes her eyes, waits to be back in Hadestown. She crouches down and lets out a small, almost-sob of a breath, clutching her chest, but the scent of oil and coal and hopelessness doesn’t fill her lungs. Instead, it’s the scent of a looming storm, fresh and clear but biting and _bitter_ , the promise of pain. Her stomach growls.

She opens her eyes. She’s crouching near the railroad tracks.

She gasps, looking around, looking at herself. She’s not in her coal-smudged uniform but in her old coat and vest. As though Hadestown had been nothing but a bad dream.

 _Had_ it? Had she imagined it all? Orpheus, Hades, the hardest choice, the bitter regret, the hope, the agony? Had it all simply been a hunger-induced dream?

Her hand brushes against her coat pocket. It bulges. She reaches in and pulls out a single red flower.

A metallic taste coats the back of her throat. She pulls herself to her feet and drags herself forward. Part of her wonders if she should go somewhere else, or at least try and think this through. But it feels distant, dreamlike. Deep down, she knows there’s only one place that she wants to be.

_“Any way the wind blows …”_

By the time she gets into town she’s _freezing_ — in Hadestown, where it was sweltering, she’d almost forgotten how much she truly hated the cold. She hugs her threadbare coat to her and looks around at the familiar faces.

They’d been friends, once. She’d danced with them and jokes about Orpheus, shared drinks and stories and sorrows. But it had all started here, with a single question.

_“Anybody got a match?”_

She speaks the words as if in a trance. Hermes holds one out, and she takes it, lights her candle, sits down. Waits for everyone to exclaim in surprise, to ask her how she got here. But no one does.

They steal glances at her, and Hermes in particular can’t stop staring. But they don’t look at her as someone they’ve shared wine with, danced with, laughed with. They don’t look at her as a friend.

And then, suddenly, he’s there. His eyes are wide and transfixed and she thinks at least he knows, at least he’ll understand. But then he opens his mouth and speaks.

_“Come home with me!”_

“Orpheus?” The words sit heavy on her tongue. They feel wrong somehow, and a pressure builds in her temples. She feels a little dizzy.

Orpheus’s brow furrows. “How do you know my name?”

“What?” But even as she says it, her tongue almost wants to twist it into _who are you_. But she knows him, knows every flyaway hair and nervous tic. Doesn’t she? And doesn’t he know her?

It’s getting harder for her to breathe. Everything feels wrong, there’s a weight on her chest and her vision is doubling and she feels the same way she felt on the few occasions that she’s actually managed to pass out from hunger, except this is worse than anything, even working in the mines.

“Do I get to know your name, then?” And he smiles, so winningly, that smile that makes her feel warmer than her candle ever could. It pulls the answer from her lips before she can even decide to give it.

“I’m Eurydice.” The second she says it, the pressure in her chest eases, and the dizziness passes. She’s fine. And she has the most absurd, sneaking sense of _relief_. Of everything being right with the world, even though it’s anything but.

Orpheus’s smile gets even more dazzling. “Your name is like a melody!”

“No, no, this isn’t right!” The dizziness comes back as if to contradict her, but she refuses to follow the script — the phrase comes from nowhere but it feels right. “We’ve met before!”

And then Hermes’s voice cuts in. Old, wise.

_“He’s not like any man you’ve met.”_

Orpheus doesn’t remember her. Everyone else acts like they’ve never met her. She can’t think that her memories were just a _dream_ , not with the flower in her pocket, but she begins to wonder if maybe they were a premonition.

A chance to change her fate.

She keeps both the old flower and her new one in her pocket, clinging to them. She falls in love with Orpheus quicker this time, her walls eroded, not wanting to waste a second with him. She hums their song in his ear while he sleeps, helping him along. But she can’t sing their song for him, not entirely. Not in the way he did, not in a way that compels the gods themselves to dance.

Persephone is late again. She’s still just as drunk and dismissive of Hermes’s worries but there’s something different about her anyway — a little lighter, ever so slightly less frantic. Eurydice dances with her and looks in her eyes, but sees no recognition.

Hades still comes for her early. The party stops too quickly and the air cools, and Persephone doesn’t sound angry anymore when she berates him for coming too soon but she does sound disappointed, like she had expected a better outcome. 

Hades smiles at her. Eurydice can’t see his eyes behind the sunglasses.

_“I missed you.”_

The winter is just as harsh and no matter what she does Orpheus won’t _listen_ to her, and before she knows it her coat is stolen and she’s standing there, staring at the King of the Underworld himself.

“I won’t go with you!” She screams after his retreating back, and then stumbles to her knees with the force of the dizziness that shout brings. His gold coins are still clutched in her fists.

She tells herself she won’t get on that train. She knows better, now. But those old doubts creep in, and somehow they’re no less convincing this time around, even though she knows that what’s waiting for her is worse.

She’s cold, she’s weak with hunger, her hands are trembling and she can barely hold herself up, drained by her defiance. The way to Hadestown is dark and long but the way home is even _longer_ now, and with no promise of food or shelter. Would she even make it back? Or will she just collapse and die right there on the pavement?

Even though she knows what happens next, even though she remembers the regret, the choice is already made for her.

_“I’m already gone…”_

She mostly sticks to “the script,” as she’s come to think of it, once she gets to Hadestown. It’s easier to, avoids that dizziness that’s more horrible than even the worst hunger. And, anyway, it’s not like there’s any use having hope. Whatever chance she had to change her fate is long gone.

But one thing is different this time. She never forgets Orpheus’s name. And she never forgets her own.

_“I’m Eurydice.”_

She repeats it to every worker she comes across. Apparently, because she said it once, it’s part of the script, because it never feels wrong to say it.

Most of them still don’t look at her, but some do. She thinks that a few even open their mouths to answer her, before quickly closing them and turning back to their work. She doesn’t know how to call them to action, not with her own grief sitting heavy on her chest.

But Orpheus does.

He’s radiant in his hope, more blinding than Hades’s lights can ever be, and she loves him more than ever. It plays out the same as before — his song, Hades’s heart being swayed, being released with one condition. Eurydice clings to Orpheus, fear and hope and doubt rolling off of her in waves.

“ _Please_ , don’t turn around.”

For some reason, the dizziness doesn’t come, even though she knows this isn’t part of the script. Orpheus holds her, and in his voice the bravado doesn’t quite mask his fear.

“I won’t.”

“I’ll be there, I’ll follow you, I promise it. _Trust_ me, Orpheus.”

“I do.” He clings to her, strokes her hair. “I do.”

But he turns. Anger thrums in Eurydice’s chest, and she can’t tell if it’s for the pitiful, trembling boy in front of her or the situation that put her there.

_“You’re early!”_

The third time Eurydice finds herself on the train platform, she bursts into tears. She’s never been one to cry but this is just too much, she doesn’t understand anything, she doesn’t understand why she’s allowed to remember if she can’t _do_ anything about it.

There are two flowers in her pocket. She pulls them out and throws them violently on the tracks. Let Persephone’s train run over them when she finally bothers to get off her wine-soaked ass and show up, for all the good that they do her.

She sits there in the train station for a long time, wondering if would be better to just starve to death here. But self-preservation has always been her main concern, and even now she doesn’t want to go hungry.

Resigned, she picks herself up and drags herself toward town.

_“And there ain’t a thing that you can do…”_

She comes to learn that three things will always happen, no matter how much she tries to resist the script.

First is that she will always fall in love with Orpheus. She simply can’t help it, anymore than she can help the hunger. She’d promised that her heart was his and always would be, but this is something else. She hates him sometimes, hates him for doubting her, but even when she hates him her love burns stronger.

Second is that she will always go to Hadestown. It doesn’t matter how hard she tries to resist — a mixture of that old hunger and the willful pulling of the script will always lead her there. Once, she resisted so hard that she actually blacked out, and when she woke up, she was on the train. 

Third is the one that hurts the most: Orpheus always turns.

It’s vexing, because it doesn’t matter what she says to him. No matter how sweetly she promises to be coming, no matter how angrily she tells him to wait for her. Even if she warns him about what she knows, it’s like he doesn’t hear, doesn’t understand. She doesn’t understand why.

_“This song was written long ago…”_

She takes to leaving the flowers in the train station once she ends up back there, before she runs out of room in her pockets. Ten, fifteen, twenty pile up, somehow never getting blown away by the wind. She wonders how Orpheus would react if she came in with an armful of them, but somehow she can never bring herself to do it.

Sometimes, she gets a whiff of hope. It seems like Persephone comes earlier now, that there’s less waiting than there was the first time, if not a proper Spring. But it’s hard to tell, and Eurydice can’t quite bring herself to believe it makes a difference.

Hades always comes early, anyway.

When Eurydice is in Hadestown, when she’s feeling a little rebellious, she sometimes stops by Persephone’s bar. The Lady of the Underground never charges her, just silently passes her a glass of spirits that smells like fresh, sweet wildflowers and warms her insides like the sun.

“Do you remember?” Eurydice whispers to her after she’s lost count of the flowers that litter the train station floor.

Persephone shakes her head. “No,” she says. “But my heart does.”

Eurydice looks into her glass. “And Hades?”

Another head shake. “Too many walls. Those can’t be broken down in a day, little songbird.” A pained smile splits her cheeks. “No matter how much I wish they could.”

“Is there anyone else who remembers like me?” Eurydice’s voice cracks. She just needs someone to confirm that she’s not crazy.

Persephone gives her a knowing look. And Eurydice understands it, somehow.

_“See, someone’s got to tell the tale…”_

The next time she opens her eyes in the train station, she makes a beeline for Hermes before he can even offer her the match. He raises his eyebrows at her, and she thinks it’s supposed to be a look of surprise but it’s a _knowing_ one, somehow. His eyes are so very, very old and wise.

She runs into him, shoving his shoulders as hard as he can. He takes a composed step backward, which somehow makes her angrier. “What is all this? What is all of this _for_?”

“Don’t you know?” Hermes’s voice is calm.

“No!” Eurydice wants to _trash_ this place, wants to throw cups and overturn tables. The others are there but their eyes are glassy and unseeing and _shadowed_ somehow. Not quite like the souls in the underground, but close. “I don’t know anything, I just know that no matter what I do, nothing changes! Nothing… Nothing ever changes.” She falls to her knees.

There’s the even, measured step of Hermes’s gait, and then he’s kneeling before her. “Are you sure?”

“I…” She trails off. She thinks of the wait for Persephone, the eyes in the Underground that dart to her. The knowing nods from Persephone, the way Orpheus tells her that she’s someone that he’s always known, with just a little more conviction each time he says it.

She looks up. Hermes’s eyes are old and wise, but that hasn’t quite removed the sorrow from them. In spite of himself, in spite of knowing how it ends, he _cares_. And so does she.

“What can I do? How can I keep trying when we fail every time?”

He hugs her, then, gentle. Eurydice’s own father was never worth a damn, but somehow the hug strikes her as paternal anyway. He murmurs gently as he slips a match into her hand.

_“Maybe it will turn out this time…”_

She tries to make the most of things. She lets Orpheus take her home on the very first night, skips the cold back and forth and moves right into the part where she lets herself want to hold him. At night, he whispers about how he’s going to write a song that brings the world back into tune, and she tells him she believes him. She does.

Because Persephone _is_ coming earlier.

It happens slowly, so slowly that if she wasn’t comparing to that first time she wouldn’t even notice. It might be as much as a day earlier each time, or an hour. But it happens, she’s sure of it. Sometimes, it almost feels like Spring when that train pulls into town.

Persephone acts fonder of her, too. She was always fond, but it’s like she remembers those evenings where they sat without words, sharing drinks in Hadestown. Probably she does. Her heart does, anyway.

Hades remembers nothing, in his head or his heart. But that’s okay, because his workers do.

It happens slowly, just as painfully slowly as Persephone’s arrival. But it happens. First, they smile a little when Eurydice offers her name. Then, they give her a nod of greeting. A handshake. A hand on her shoulder. And, finally, she begins to learn their names, and their stories.

Icarus, who was so dazzled by the light of Hadestown that he was happy to fall. Mermerus and Pheres, who were forced into labor by their mother to spite their father. Medusa, shunned as a monster until she had nowhere else to go. Hyacinth. Narcissus. Sisyphus. More.

They begin to change. Niobe, who came here from grief after her children died, takes Mermerus and Pheres under her wing. Achilles and Patroclus hold each other, remembering the love that made the former follow the latter into Hadestown.

They live. In spite of Hades’ orders, and his threats. They remember.

_“Show the way the world can be...”_

Hadestown isn’t really so bad anymore, in spite of Hades’s best efforts. There are more cracks in the wall now. But Eurydice always longs for the world above. For the flowers, for dancing. And of course, for Orpheus.

He always comes for her. She always begs him, begs him not to turn around. “End this,” she tells him. “Orpheus, it’s up to you now. Please, take me home.”

“I will,” he promises. And he breaks that promise, over and over again. She’s given up being angry at him. Maybe he’s compelled by the same force that brings her down into Hadestown, again and again.

She drops her latest flower onto the ground. If she gathered them all up into a pile they’d probably be taller than her, now.

“What more can I do?” She asks Hermes before taking the match. “Nothing I say to Orpheus or Hades makes a difference. Neither of them remember.” Well, Orpheus remembers that he loves her. Nothing could make him forget that, she thinks. But what good is that love against the doubt? It’s never enough.

“Hades won’t be convinced until Orpheus shows his workers the way out,” Hermes says. “That’s a fact.”

“But I’ve tried everything!” Exasperation claws at Eurydice’s throat. “He never believes me, no matter how many times I tell him I’m going to be behind him!”

Hermes offers her a match. “Do you really think that it’s _you_ that he doubts?”

_“Who am I, that I should get to hold you?”_

She sees it, then. She’s always imagined him as so headstrong, so hopeful. How could a boy who defies the gods themselves be anything but confident? But the more she watches him with new eyes, the more she realizes that he doesn’t think very much of himself. He sees doubt as a weakness, so how can he think of himself as anything but weak? He doesn’t realize that he’s _allowed_ to doubt, that doubting isn’t the same as being consumed by it.

When the time comes for him to lead her out of the underworld, she takes his face in both of her hands. “Orpheus.”

“I’m going to keep walking, I won’t doubt you, I swear it—”

“Hush,” she tells him. “Yes, you will doubt.”

He goes silent, eyes wide and surprised.

“You will doubt me,” she tells him, her voice even. “You will doubt Hades’s promise. You will doubt yourself. You’re going to doubt because you’re _human_ , Orpheus. If you don’t learn to sit with that doubt, we’re going to be trapped like this forever.”

“I don’t understand,” he tells her.

“I know,” she responds, kind. “You spent all this time teaching me how to hope, Orpheus. It’s time for me to teach you how to doubt… and keep moving anyway.”

When he turns this time, she’s disappointed but not surprised. She thinks, maybe, he’s a step closer to the light than he was the last time. She smiles at him, even as the tears fill her eyes, even as she sinks.

“See you next time,” she tells him, he reaches for her, and she falls.

_“We’re gonna sing it again and again…”_

Change happens slowly, as it so often does. But it does happen. The more that Eurydice treats Orpheus like a person, the less she holds him to the impossible demands he’s set for himself, the less she asks for promises he can’t keep, the closer they get. And the more she loves him — with all of his strengths and all of his imperfections. Her silly, kind, generous, _headstrong_ poet.

Hades comes a little later — still early, but later. He looks lost, almost pleading when he looks over his sunglasses at Eurydice. She remembered thinking about how formal and important he looked. Now he looks like a child to her, willfully ignorant.

There was a time where she hated him, and she thinks she still does, a little. But she pities him, too, this aging king clinging to a kingdom that’s no longer his.

He sings for Persephone and she takes his hands in his. Eurydice wonders how she can forgive him, but then she thinks about how she could never really hold Orpheus’s betrayal against him — even at her most angry, it wasn’t really him she was angry at.

It’s with Persephone that she spends most of her time in Hadestown, now that shifts are less strict. The drinks they share are less strong as time goes on. They’re both waiting, she realizes.

_“How long, how long, how long?”_

She keeps her most recent flower in her pocket, this time. She doesn’t know why she does it — there’s still plenty of room by the tracks, even if the flowers coat the ground pretty thoroughly by now. But she plays with it the whole way, admiring the petals, smelling it.

She smiles at Hermes when she takes his match. She kisses his hand. He smiles back at her. He’s Orpheus’s mentor, but he’s come to have a fondness for her, too. They can understand each other in a way that no one else can.

This time, _she’s_ the one to approach Orpheus, the familiar dizziness of ignoring the script a minor annoyance by this point. “Take me home with you,” she demands, and he does.

She tells him he’s brave, he’s kind, he’s doing a wonderful thing. But she also warns him against putting too much pressure on himself. “I’ve been working on putting the world back in tune too, lover,” she tells him. “From the other side of the wall.”

Orpheus gives her a quizzical look. “But no one who goes to Hadestown comes back,” he says, even though Hermes hasn’t told him that yet. His heart remembers, just as it remembers her.

She brings his hand to her lips. “You’ll see,” she tells him. “Just believe me when I tell you that a lot of people are working on this. You don’t have to do it alone.”

The workers still want — _need_ — Orpheus to show them the way. But they’re getting closer and closer to finding the way themselves. They do half of Orpheus’s work for him. His song is just the final puzzle piece.

He stares out at the crowd, disbelieving. “You told me that you were working on the other side of the wall,” he tells Eurydice. “Is this what you meant?”

She squeezes his hand. “I told you that you weren’t alone. Now listen to me.”

He turns to her. And for once, on this matter at least, she feels like he’s actually _hearing_ her.

“Doubt is unavoidable,” she tells him. “You will always be haunted by the what ifs. What if this is a trick, what if I’m not good enough, what if she’s turned around?”

Orpheus would have interrupted her before. Now he doesn’t.

“When those doubts creep in, here’s what I want you to think. What if it _isn’t_ a trick? What if she’s been behind me all along?” She laughs. “You can’t make the doubt go away, Orpheus, even if you do have hope. That’s what I’ve learned. But what you can do is keep on going in _spite_ of it. Because there’s nothing to gain by entertaining that doubt, Orpheus, don’t you see? If you turn around and I’m not there, what good would it do? Might as well wait and see if we actually made it.”

Orpheus blinks. “I never thought about it like that before.”

“I know.” She hugs him, tight. “I love you, Orpheus. I love you so much.”

_“Wait for me.”_

He trembles the whole walk up. She can see it even when the shadows are at their darkest, sees the way he pulls at his hair. He sings but his voice doesn’t reach her, any more than her words of encouragement reach him.

The light is in the distance. And then it gets closer. They’re on the steps, so close to freedom. Eurydice can hear the wind and the birds and the trees. Five steps, four. Three. Two.

One.

She steps into the grass, blinking at the light. The sun warms her face and arms. The train tracks and all of her flowers are off to the side. Orpheus stands before her, still trembling, still with his back to her. She can hear him now, singing their song in a cracked, broken voice. She reaches out and touches his arm.

He spins around, eyes wide. “It’s _you_ ,” he breathes.

“It’s me.” She smiles at him, and this time the tears that well up in her eyes are happy ones. Her heart feels _full_ , so full that it banishes her ever-present hunger for the first time. She grins so wide that she thinks her cheeks might split right open. “Orpheus?”

He smiles then, grips her tightly by the waist. “Eurydice!” He picks her up and spins her around. And at that exact moment, a breeze blows, powerful but warm. A _Spring_ breeze. It scatters the flowers from the train station, makes them float around the two as they embrace. They laugh and laugh.

“What _is_ all this?” Orpheus plucks one of the flowers from the sky. He looks at it wonderingly, then back to her. “Eurydice?”

“I know.” And she thinks understanding, or something like it, comes into his eyes. He holds her close, and she stands on her toes to kiss him. “It’s over now, lover. Take me home.”

They walk home, arm in arm. In the distance, the train’s whistle signals the beginning of Spring.

_“To the world we dream about… and the one we live in now.”_

**Author's Note:**

> “The goal is never that you’re going to succeed, even in your generation. The goal is just nudging the needle.”
> 
> — Amber Gray, “Get Closer” from BUILD


End file.
